Vaughn Palmer: Book on Dave Barrett’s government contains a history lesson in how not to get re-elected

Former B.C. premier Dave Barrett.

Photograph by: Ian Smith, PNG Files
, Vancouver Sun

VICTORIA — As New Democrats work on the agenda for a possible next term of government, bookstores are carrying a timely and telling history of the party’s short, eventful first turn at the helm of this difficult province.

The Art of the Impossible, Dave Barrett and the NDP in Power 1972-75, by New Democrat and Vancouver councillor Geoff Meggs and Globe and Mail reporter Rod Mickleburgh, is a sympathetic account of the government that gave B.C. the agricultural land reserve, public auto insurance, Pharmacare and myriad other innovations.

But for all their admiration of the political force of nature that was Dave Barrett, their book also provides a thoroughgoing account of why he was confined to a single, if memorable, term of office as premier.

One of the most vivid chapters recounts the late-term showdown with organized labour, a battle that provided the Barrett administration with its finest hour, arguably, as well as, no less arguably, the ruin of its chances for re-election.

The clash was framed by Barrett’s decision, in the midst of a growing number of labour disputes in the fall of 1975, to impose a 90-day cooling-off period on some 50,000 private-sector workers.

“We just legislated the whole f---ing lot back to work, the whole s---load, “ the premier confided to an aide after the strikebreaking bill was tabled in the legislature on Oct. 7, 1975.

“For an NDP government, this course of action should have been unthinkable,” say the authors. “This after all was a party formed in partnership with the labour movement, an alliance that lined NDP coffers with money from Canadian unions.”

Labour’s reaction ranged from disbelief to fury. “A complete betrayal of the working people who helped elect this government,” raged Len Guy, then head of the B.C. Federation of Labour. “Rarely in modern times has a government in Canada interfered so brutally in free collective bargaining.”

Barrett was unapologetic for siding with what he saw as the economic interests of the province. “We are not a labour party,” he declared. “Our roots are (with) the working people but we are not a trade union party.”

The authors — and I would note that Mickleburgh covered these events first-hand as a labour reporter at The Vancouver Sun — rightly pay tribute to the way Barrett was backstopped by his minister of labour, Bill King, a locomotive engineer and trade unionist from Revelstoke.

Barrett sized up King ahead of the 1972 election win, asking him during a moment in the campaign: “Do you believe in the supremacy of labour or the supremacy of the party?” The latter, said King, giving the correct answer so far as the cabinet-maker-to-be was concerned.

For all Barrett’s certainty that he was doing the right thing, when he rolled the dice on an early election a month after the legislative move, he paid the price with trade unionists and NDP activists.

“They would vote for the NDP, maybe even drop them a dollar or two,” write Meggs and Mickleburgh. “But they would not expend nearly the same energy for a party they now believed had abandoned its long support for hallowed labour principles.”

“There’s no doubt we didn’t get the labour support we would have otherwise received,” confirmed King in an interview with the authors. “But you know, that’s the penalty you pay for doing what you think is necessary.”

King would go on paying for the rest of his career in politics. When Barrett finally surrendered the party leadership after two more electoral defeats, King sought the top job for himself. The strikebreaking legislation still counted against him in some quarters and he finished third after the untried David Vickers and the inadequate Bob Skelly.

So for all of its focus on the Barrett legacy (a 97-point list is included as an appendix), the book also provides an instructive lesson in how one of the biggest challenges facing an NDP government is satisfying the expectations of its own supporters.

Times change, of course. Looking back on those days, one is struck by how the heavyweights in labour hailed from private-sector unions. Public-sector unions were just finding their footing, Barrett having given them full collective bargaining and the right to strike.

Today, the balance of power has shifted to the public-sector unions, which have their own ideas about what an NDP government should do for them.

The challenge of meeting those expectations was on display this week when NDP leader Adrian Dix addressed the Hospital Employees’ Union, as chronicled by Mickleburgh, wearing his hat as a Globe and Mail reporter.

“There are some things we want to do, but which we won’t be able to afford in the first four years of our mandate,” said Dix, repeating his familiar line about the fiscal reality he expects to be facing if he wins the next election.

Still, by way of consolation, he promised to repeal the legislative provisions, brought in by the Liberals, that made it all too easy to shift public HEU jobs to private operators.

It’s the kind of talk, like speculation about changes in the labour code and scorn for public-private partnerships, that is calculated to placate the unions for now. But if the NDP wins, labour’s expectations will no doubt be on the rise once again.

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